If a tree falls in a forest, will Verizon hear it?

Rocky has a short fuse dealing with incompetent Customer Service Representatives. Yesterday, he made a wager with Trophy Wife that he would not lose his temper while reporting a Verizon DSL outage.

Verizon network engineers only investigate network problems after many users complain. However, Verizon’s troubleshooting procedure now requires an hour-long phone call with a CSR. Obviously very few people will spend an hour to report a problem (and Verizon’s self-calculated network reliability perversely increases as a result)!

Rocky’s DSL went down (again) yesterday evening. He ran network diagnostics and discovered a 50-100% loss of packets. After making his wager with Trophy Wife, he called Verizon:

Rocky: “I’d like to report a DSL outage”
Verizon: “Noone in your area has reported an outage.”
Rocky: “I know. It just went down. If you look at the service history of this area code and exchange, you’ll note problems for the past sixty days. I am experiencing substantial packet loss based on ping tests.”

[After 45 minutes of having Rocky power-cycle his computer, check his modem settings and run completely irrelevant commands on his pc…]

Rocky: “Do you agree that Verizon has a network problem?”
Verizon: “No. Your modem is faulty. We will ship you a new one.”
Rocky: “I keep a spare. Let me plug it in.”

[After 20 more minutes of the same settings check.]

Rocky: “Do you now agree that my modem is fine, and you have a network problem?”
Verizon: “No. We are not having a network problem. Noone else is reporting a problem. You replaced your current modem with an old unsupported modem.”

Rocky: “$#*($%!(*&#%#(*$#$###$#!!!!!”

Trophy Wife won the bet.

[Disclosure: Cablevision once asked Trophy Wife (while reporting a problem) whether she knew how to turn on a television, and then not believing her affirmative response, asked to speak to her husband. Rocky and Trophy Wife are no longer Cablevision customers.]

In any event, Rocky took your advice and ordered FIOS. Supposedly Verizon is burying cable between the telco pole and the house this week. If Rocky comes home to find a geyser of water shooting out of a severed underground water line, he’ll know that Verizon was “on-the-job,” and Port 80 will be the least of his concerns.

ld was much relieved to see canyouseeme’s response “Error: I could not see your service on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on port (80)
Reason: Connection timed out”. It would worry me very much if someone could ping in – I assume my house switch firewall is doing this and not Verizon in one of their switches.

Also, check out http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/. This says that my connection speed with FIOS is 20775 kbps download and 4569 kbps upload. This is better than Comcast and anything else I’ve tried for home Internet.